He has not the vaguest idea what the decision actually says. An editor should have told him to do what I did when I first wrote about Mount Laurel: get a copy of the decision and fill it up with Post-It notes.

The kid's first mistake is in the headline: "Property Rights Apply to Poor People, Too."

If the kid had read the Mount Laurel decisions, he would realize they were not based on property rights. No conservative would have objected if the court had simply thrown out the Mount Laurel zoning ordinance for violating the rights of the landowner.

That's not what happened. The judges did not concern themselves with the rights of the property owner. They instead created new "constitutional rights of our lower-income citizens" to buy houses in the suburbs even if they could not afford them in free-market conditions.

The kid is under the impression that court simply ordered the township to get out of the way of the free market.

Not at all. the court specifically said it was not going to "sweep away all land use restrictions or leave open spaces and natural resources prey to speculators" i.e. property owners who wish to develop and sell their land.

And the court went on to order that "Affirmative governmental devices should be used to make that opportunity realistic, including lower-income density bonuses and mandatory set-asides."

Mandatory set-asides? That's the furthest thing from a free market.

The kid goes on to write:

So regulations setting minimum lot sizes and restricting the construction of townhouses and apartment buildings creates a de facto minimum income for living in a particular municipality. If you’re not rich enough to buy a single-family home on a large lot, you won’t be able to live in most of New Jersey’s swankier suburbs.

Mount Laurel was far from being a "swanky suburb" back then. It was just a patch of the Pine Barrens, not unlike Toms River, where I grew up. And as in Toms River, the zoning permitted single-family houses on quarter-acre lots. My family's cost a mere $9,200 in 1960 and was worth only a bit more than that in the 1970s when the first Mount Laurel case was decided.

And then there's this from the decision:

"It is our intention by this decision generally to channel the entire prospective lower income housing need in New Jersey into growth areas."

The decision is full of that sort of socialist claptrap. The court comes out against "irrational development," and calls for "formulas that accord substantial weight to employment opportunities in the municipality."

I have so many of these Post-It notes on my copy that I could turn them into a book on bad judging practices. Here's another citation refuting any idea that this was a property-rights decision:

"It is equally unrealistic, even where the land is owned by a developer eager to build, simply to rezone that land to permit the construction of lower-income housing if the construction of other housing is permitted on the same land and the latter is more profitable than lower-income housing."

And so on. The decision fills 111 printed pages. I defy anyone to find a single sentence that shows the court cared in the tiniest bit about property rights or the free market.

Anyway the kid ends up blasting Chris Christie for being opposed to high-density development. That's news to me, and I see the Guv once a week or so.

And then there's this:

The Republican Party is theoretically the party of property rights and limited government, but it seems to forget these principles when it comes to the freedom of poor people to live where they like.

Kid, poor people are entirely free to live wherever they like in Jersey. What the court said is that someone else should subsidize them. That is the farthest thing from a free-market argument possible.

Get thee to an editor. And tell him to make you read before you write.